Exotic Birds and Strange Fruit: Large Pair of Mirrored Palaceware Vases
Stephen Bowers
Details
- Artist
- Stephen Bowers
- Title
- Exotic Birds and Strange Fruit: Large Pair of Mirrored Palaceware Vases
- Year
- 2012
- Medium
- wheel-thrown earthenware, underglaze colour, clear earthenware glaze, on-glaze gold lustre
- Size
- 75 x 55 cm diam.
- Details
Form thrown by Mark Heidenreich
- Stock Number
- 212123
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Exhibited
Stephen Bowers, Larks Tongues in Aspic Part IV, Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, Melbourne, 27 Oct - 8 Dec 2012
Further Information
Paying specific homage to bird illustrator William Cooper, pairs of red tailed black cockatoos and sulphur crested white cockatoos perch in an overall design of rich botanical composition against a background of gold lustre.
Botanical elements in the design reference the engraved Banksia serrata from Sir Joseph Bank’s Florigelium (in turn based on a finshed drawing by J.F.Miller from the original watercolour by Cook’s draftsman and artist of the Endeavour Voyage, Sidney Parkinson. As well as the ubiquitous Australiana of gum nuts and leaves, other elements reference designs from French printed cotton toile produced by the Oberkampf factory in Jouy in about 1775. The scrolling tendril upon which the two white cockatoos sit is a composite, derived from a Roman cup ornament and a fragment of a Greek relief, both found in Meyers Handbook of Ornament Batsford 1892.